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Relaxnews

Aug 20, 2014

, Last Updated: 5:10 PM ET

Sony is launching a perfume bottle-inspired selfie camera that can clip to the top of a smartphone and can be twisted to face forward or back.

Due to be unveiled officially in China on Friday, the new product might seem like a joke, but in actual fact, it's a concerted effort to combine two growing trends among female smartphone owners in China.

Just like in pretty much every country in the world, 2014 appears to be the year that taking a smartphone selfie has come into its own in China, and this growing obsession has arrived at the same time as another smartphone-focused fashion trend -- protective cases that are designed to look like designer perfume bottles -- a development that U.S. tech blog Engadget was quick to report.

So Sony has designed a new self-contained camera that will make a handset look like a bottle of perfume and that will offer professional self portrait results.

To avoid being dismissed as a throwaway gimmick, according to G for Games, the camera itself has some very serious specs lurking behind its faux crystal casing. It packs 19.2 megapixels, image stabilization and a shutter speed of 1/8000 seconds. It even has a slot for an SD card and is powered by its own battery.

And although the device won't be officially launched until Aug. 22, images of the camera in use are already appearing all over Weibo.